National Ballet of China: Swan Lake
Royal Opera House
My first article for The Spectator was a slightly long-winded analysis of the state of Swan Lake on the eve of the ballet’s centenary. It followed a far more pedantic four-part essay in the specialist magazine Dancing Times, of which the late Frank Johnson, my first editor, was an avid reader. Although those writings were a passport to what has so far been a pleasant journalistic stint in the UK, they were also a curse in disguise. Since their publication, a few friends and readers have (wrongly) considered me to be the ultimate authority on the wretched 1895 ballet, and every time a new Swan Lake pops up they ring, write and email to ask whether the new production is good or not. Which is something impossible to state, as there are no fixed parameters to assess a work that has been historically manipulated, interpolated, mutilated, lengthened and rechoreographed 239 times — at least according to my home-grown statistics.
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